The Coke Machine (2 page)

Step, now, inside the Coke Machine.

Coca-Cola represents the sublimated essence of all that America stands for, a decent thing, honestly made.

-NEWSPAPER EDITOR WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, 1938

I
n Atlanta, Coke gets in your face. The drink is everywhere, from the Coca-Cola memorabilia store in the airport entry hall to the announcements on the subway train for Coca-Cola headquarters. All around the city, Coke’s leading executives have lent their names to the city’s major landmarks: Pemberton Park, the Candler Building, the Woodruff Arts Center, and the Goizueta Business School at Emory University to name just a few. But few authentic landmarks remain from the drink’s history. The home of its inventor and the pharmacy where it was first served have both disappeared.

Those faithful seeking out the origins of Coca-Cola are directed instead to the World of Coca-Cola, a massive homage to the beverage in the center of the city that remains virtually the only place in the world where the public can come face-to-face with the history of its favorite soft drink. And come they do. One million visitors crossed under the thirty-foot Coke bottle hanging over its entrance in the year after it relocated here from a smaller space across town in 2007. Visitors still must call ahead to reserve a time for a tour, paying $15 for the privilege.

What they get when they do, of course, is an image of Coke completely mediated by Coke. Even before they enter, ambient advertising ditties—“Always Coca-Cola,” “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”—float down from speakers above. Inside, the company starts early to establish a spirit of benign internationalism, with a lobby full of giant “folk art” bottles decorated by artists from around the globe, set against a conspicuously multicultural portrait wall of world citizens—Japanese teenagers, a white-bread couple on the beach, three tropical dark kids, a pierced chick in a bar—all enjoying their Cokes.

The theme continues as the doors open into a blinding atrium whose walls churn with words like “refresh,” “heritage,” and “optimism” printed in every language. There are more multicultural portraits here, too. A phone receiver hanging next to each one, playing a recorded loop that describes Coke-funded work to tackle HIV/AIDS in Africa, water depletion in Pakistan, and child malnutrition in Argentina. There’s even an American doctor from the Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, which is pioneering research to counter the national childhood obesity epidemic.

If you knew nothing else about it, you’d think the Coca-Cola Company was incorporated for the sole purpose of spreading peace and social equality around the world. The real work of the museum, however, happens when visitors step out of the lobby and into the first exhibit—called “Milestones of Refreshment”—telling the story of how it all began.

“When John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in 1886, he had no way of knowing what a phenomenon his creation would become,” narrates a soothing baritone emanating from a video screen. Upon entering, visitors meet a bronze statue of the man himself, stirring a kettle with a wooden spoon. Broad-shouldered, bearded, and wearing overalls, the man in the statue looks more like a Soviet-era paean to the proletariat than one of the great progenitors of capitalism. “His idea,” the video continues, “was to create a beverage specifically formulated to be served ice-cold.” In doing so, he “invented a completely new category for refreshment, and his formula for Coca-Cola became one of the world’s most closely guarded secrets. Still, people began to discover the most exciting thing about Coca-Cola: that it’s delicious and refreshing. And that’s no secret at all.”

The short video is impressive for hitting all of Coke’s marketing leitmotifs—Delicious. Refreshing. Ice-Cold. Secret Formula. In reality, however, it was not so poetic. Pemberton’s goal was hardly to create a new category of cold drink; like many people, he wanted to make himself rich. And in 1880, the quickest way to do that was found inside a bottle, through the creation of medicinal cure-alls called “patent medicines.” The Coca-Cola Company doesn’t like to talk about its early medicinal past; the sordid proto-history doesn’t fit in well with the clean-scrubbed mythology it promotes in the World of Coca-Cola (and more broadly in the world of Coca-Cola). Even today, however, traces of the company’s patent-medicine past are present in how it promotes and markets the drink.

The term “patent medicines” has nothing to do with the United States Patent Office, originating instead in the practice of British kings’ granting “patents of royal favor” to favorite medicine makers. A few decades after bumping up against Plymouth Rock, colonists began importing medicines like Hooper’s Pills and Daffy’s Elixir to treat rheumatism, gout, tuberculosis—even cancer. Their inventors took great pains to guard the secret formulas of their proprietary combination of ingredients. As late Atlanta historian James Harvey Young writes in the definitive
Toadstool Millionaires
, “Rivals might detect the major active constituents, but the original proprietor could claim that only he knew all the elements in their proper proportions.”

If Britons invented patent medicines, Americans became obsessed with them. After the Revolutionary War, vast swathes of the newly independent United States were a mucky, roadless wilderness. Doctors were scarce, and even when available, they were as apt to kill their patients as to heal them. The cutting edge of medical practice, after all, included bleeding with a sharp lancet and “purging” the bowels with mercury, thereby weakening and poisoning already sick patients. By the early 1800s, a backlash against doctors was in full swing, with many people avoiding them altogether in favor of whatever home remedies they could find. The practice grew into a fad with the publication of
New Guide to Health
by Samuel Thomson, a self-taught herbalist from New Hampshire who claimed any man could be his own doctor using plants readily available in the fields and woods of the young country.

Less scrupulous entrepreneurs and con men exploited the trend with their own American patent medicine blends that went far beyond the British concoctions in both claims and popularity. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Connecticut physician Samuel Lee, Jr., mixed up a batch of soap, aloe, and potassium nitrate and pressed them into “Bilious Pills,” which he touted as a cure against indigestion and flatulence. Within a decade, they were sold as far away as the Mississippi River. Soon after, Thomas W. Dyott amassed a fortune of a quarter of a million dollars with concoctions such as the hot-selling Robertson’s Infallible Worm Destroying Lozenges. These tycoons found a ready clientele with the rapid industrialization of the early 1800s, when laborers crowded into disease-ridden tenements. The Civil War brought new patients in the form of soldiers suffering from wounds and disease, many of whom received tonics along with their rations.

In truth, most patent medicines were little more than laxatives or emetics (to induce vomiting), often containing up to 50 percent alcohol. Consumers didn’t seem to care. By the turn of the twentieth century, they were big business, with anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000 different concoctions on offer and total sales of $80 million. For every fortune, however, a dozen vendors went bankrupt. The winners were those who created the best story, the coolest shaped container, or the catchiest advertisements to cement their names in consumers’ minds. Some relied on tales of exotic ingredients from Africa or the Far East. Others drew upon American Indian lore, pegging their origins, for example, to a secret formula given by an Indian chief to a trapper in exchange for rescuing his son from a bear.

No one exploited these gimmicks more relentlessly than a new breed of traveling salesmen who staged elaborate presentations known as “medicine shows.” A fixture of American life for nearly a century, these roving productions traveled the country in the hundreds during their height, from 1880 to 1900. After a “ballyhoo” of musical bandwagons, magicians, and comedians to warm up the crowd, salesmen reeled in buyers with their pitches, often whipping up fears of disease before magically “healing” a planted crowd member. One of the most notorious showmen, Clark Stanley, publicly killed hundreds of rattlesnakes to advertise his Snake Oil Liniment, which was eventually discovered to be little more than camphor and turpentine—forever making the term “snake-oil salesman” synonymous with fraud.

 

 

 

But most customers
convinced themselves that the elixirs they bought from these traveling road shows actually worked. As one 1930s-era pitch doctor explained, the key was to hypnotize the buyer into thinking he’d come up with the idea to buy the product himself: “First, attention; second, interest; third, suggestion; fourth, imagination; fifth, desire; sixth, decision,” he explained. After years of shows, medicines such as Kickapoo Indian Sagwa and Hamlin’s Wizard Oil sold themselves, bringing crowds flocking whenever their wagons rolled into town. It was this kind of success that Civil War colonel and pharmacist John Pemberton was seeking when he moved to Atlanta from nearby Columbus, Georgia, in 1870. Pemberton was an early devotee of Samuel Thomson’s “every man his own doctor” philosophy, stirring local herbs and flowers into his own concoctions in a lab behind his pharmacy shop. He sold some, including Globe Flower Cough Syrup, marketed for consumption and bronchitis, and a “blood medicine” called Extract of Stillingia.

Yet Pemberton was no sleazy snake oil salesman. Wounded in one of the Civil War’s last battles, he was constantly plagued with pain himself, and took to self-dosing in an effort to find relief for the rest of his life. In fact, one tidbit that doesn’t make it into the official Coca-Cola myth is that he probably regularly dipped into his pharmacy cabinet for hits of morphine. Three of Pemberton’s colleagues in the drug trade later named him an addict. If that was true, the addiction likely led him to the substance that would seal his legacy: cocaine.

“I am convinced from actual experiments that [coca] is the very best substitute for opium, for a person addicted in the opium habit, that has ever been discovered,” he told
The Atlanta Journal
in 1885, adding that “the patient who will use it as a means of cure may deliver himself from the pernicious habit without inconvenience or pain.” He wasn’t alone in thinking so. Years before cocaine was found to be addictive, the little leaf from Peru was celebrated as a miracle drug. One Albany, New York, manufacturer marketed Cocaine Toothache Drops, picturing two contented children on a package trumpeting an “Instantaneous Cure!” (Indeed.)

But the most popular coca-laced “medicine” was a concoction called Vin Mariani, created by Parisian chemist Angelo Mariani by mixing red Bordeaux with a half a grain of cocaine. He cheerfully recommended three glasses a day for whatever ailed you—approximately one line of powder daily. A born promoter, Mariani landed endorsements for his product from celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic—including Thomas Edison, Queen Victoria, and three popes.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Pemberton was obsequious in his 1884 invention French Wine Coca—a thinly veiled knockoff of Mariani. Pemberton’s formula differed by only a few extra ingredients, the most significant being kola nut, a stimulant chewed by manual laborers in West Africa containing caffeine in higher concentrations than tea or coffee. After scraping along for fifteen years in Atlanta’s patent medicine industry, Pemberton finally hit pay dirt with this new beverage, selling French Wine Coca by the case.

His timing, however, was impeccably bad. In November 1885, Atlanta declared it would be joining many states and counties in banning alcohol, taking effect the following July. That gave Pemberton only a few months to retool his formula to appeal to an America newly obsessed with sobriety. That obsession, which had been slowly gaining steam for almost a hundred years, led to the creation of the soft drink industry that would assure Pemberton’s success.

In early years,
in fact, most beverages in America had been alcoholic. Despite the dour image of Puritans and Pilgrims, beer was one of the first luxuries imported to New England, not to mention the cheapest form of water purification in a world of haphazard hygiene. Soon enterprising drunkards were fermenting anything they could get their hands on—Indian corn, birch bark, even twigs boiled in maple sap. Children drank hard cider at breakfast, and college students passed two-quart tankards down their cafeteria tables.

Not everyone was such a lush, however. Some abstemious colonists served nonalcoholic drinks flavored with sugar cane or juniper berries under the name “beverige,” the direct ancestors of soft drinks. Meanwhile, the well-to-do made pilgrimages to effervescent mineral springs such as those at Saratoga Springs, New York, which were thought to have healing properties. In 1767, Englishman Joseph Priestley discovered how to produce the same carbonation artificially by mixing crushed chalk with sulfuric acid to create “fixed air” (carbon dioxide), and then pumping it into water or other beverages to make them fizzy.